The International Dateline and the Sabbath: Straining at a gant and swallowing the camel...

It is amazing to watch the lengths some COG "leaders" go to defend their beliefs and "prove" that the Sabbath is required. Never fully studying about the Sabbath requirement for New Covenant followers, they rely fully upon COG publications written by a myriad of so-called educated leaders. Even then, certain men have decided that COG "proofs" have not gone far enough to suit their hyper-legalistic minds so they come up with even more bizarre scenarios and teachings.

Case in point, the International Dateline, and Sabbath-keeping.

The problem the COG has as a whole is that they have to deal with that pesky International Dateline which causes some people to keep sabbath on one day while in other parts of the world have yet to keep it or may have already done so. This causes a conundrum to a lot of diehard Sabbath-keepers who think the entire world must stop at the same time.

Never fear though, COG members and some "leaders" have an answer for everything. OzWitness, an Australian COG site has determined that the International Dateline is WRONG and is causing "true" Christians to keep Sabbath on the wrong day. So, they have come up with a new "dateline" to ensure that the entire world keeps sabbath at the same time.

OzWitness states:

The International dateline is not something that most of us have considered. Most of us have just taken for granted that we keep the Sabbath on the seventh day, as scripture requires. Those who travel across it though and those who live East of Jerusalem but West of the present dateline, may have wondered if the Bible has anything to say on this subject, so let’s examine the biblical evidence, and then come to our own conclusion.

"Coming to our own conclusion" is the reason the COG is in such a horrendous mess. With hundreds and hundreds of bloviating men making all kinds of idiotic proclamations, no one, and mean NO ONE, has any idea what the COG even stands for anymore.

Yellow highlights are mine, colored word highlights are the original author's:

We know that God has provided the instruction and examples in the Bible for the month and the year and He would not fail to provide the needed information on the dateline, because the fact is that, though many people have not thought about this, there has to be one somewhere – a definite line on the earth where God’s day begins. Any conclusions drawn without including that vital dateline must be invalid!

No well-researched religious scholar, no Jewish rabbi or theologian, no mathematician, no scientist, and not even Arab geographer Abulfeda and explorer Magellan were/are as correct as a lay COG member.

This is simply because the earth rotates. If we travel East, against the rotation, the day is shorter as the sun seems to come towards us, and sunset is earlier. If we travel West, with the sun, the days are longer than 24 hours. Of course, without knowing where the true dateline is, those of us who live East of Jerusalem, but West of the present International Date Line, do not securely know when to keep the annual Holy Days which Jesus Christ kept.

But a COG member sure does!  

Also, we are concerned to make sure we keep the seventh day Holy. Genesis 2:3, ‘And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.’ We need to keep a tight check on the days, and we know that at the time of Jesus the Jews were keeping the correct day. Jesus vouched for that by His agreement of both the Sabbath and Holy Days back then. Since then, the Romans drove many Jews from the ‘Holy Land’ in a great diaspora, but, no matter where they went, East or West, they carried the same day with them, and no matter where they ended up, today most are in agreement about which day is the 7th, from Hong Kong, to Cape town, to San Francisco.

They did this without any reference to an international dateline, because travel back then was slow. They had no watches and they would not have noticed that the day was either a little longer or shorter, depending on whether they were moving West or East. Actually, the dateline had not been invented then anyway, it only came about after men began to circumnavigate the earth in ships, and depending on which way they went, they either seemed to ‘lose’ or ‘gain’ a day against the calendar they started out from. When the Sabbath was restored at Sinai, the Israelites began to keep it, though they were not in Israel, and later Daniel kept the Sabbath in Babylon, as did Ezekiel and Ezra, though they started it long before it commenced in Jerusalem. Paul travelled far to the West and kept the same Sabbath, but much later than those at Jerusalem. Obviously then, there is no rule that we should keep the identical time with Jerusalem.

So, the fact is that, no matter which way the Jews travelled from Jerusalem, even eventually as far as America, West, or China East, they retained the knowledge of the true Sabbath, even though much later, disagreements arose amongst their scholars, which have not changed the majority of Jewish practice, and to this day the vast majority of Jews worldwide keep the Sabbath on the same date. 

So if the knowledge of the "true" Sabbath and the fact that Jews all observe Sabbath, then what is ht issue?

Well, this is the Church of God and after all, it is ALL KNOWING on EVERYTHING imaginable.

So, why is it that among some Christian 7th Day Sabbath keepers, there is some confusion about which day is the seventh? Well, these days we travel by air and it is not uncommon to cross half the world in 24 hours. It then becomes very noticeable that you have ‘lost’ or ‘gained time’, and the world has had to agree on the dateline, the longitude East or West of the prime meridian which was placed at Greenwich, England, where a new calendar day begins. 

Because England was the dominant seafaring nation when this occurred, all longitudinal lines are based on Greenwich, as 0 degrees, and, as a result, the dateline was set at 180 degrees East, on a great longitudinal circle that encompasses the globe (there are 360 degrees in whole) exactly on the opposite side of the earth from Greenwich. That was where each new day would start, at twelve midnight, and the day would progress West around the earth.

This proved very convenient, because 180 degrees East, is over the Pacific Ocean, the largest and emptiest body of water on the planet. Although they bent the line a little to avoid one or two islands, it avoids all land, which is the third vital requirement to avoid confusion. Imagine if the dateline went over land. It could happen that people on one side of a street were keeping Friday, and those on the other, Saturday, an impossible situation, so the choice seemed logical enough.

This positioning of the start of the day in the Pacific Ocean, upsets some Christians though, because of the scriptural belief that Jerusalem is the centre of the world, Ezekiel 5:5, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD; This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nations and countries that are round about her.’ And 38:12, ‘To take plunder, and to carry off spoil; to turn your hand upon the desolate places that are now inhabited, and upon the people that are gathered out of the nations, who have gotten cattle and goods, that dwell in the midst of the land.’ And that the law must go forth from Zion, Isaiah 2:3, ‘And many people shall go and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.’

This is quite true, for all our attention is centred on Jerusalem, and observations from there with regard to calendar issues, and the Biblical dateline must include this principle, but then, too early conclusions, such as, ‘those to the East cannot start the Sabbath until it has started in Jerusalem’, have been drawn, because certain scriptures are not recognised or considered.

Men have often felt the need to introduce their own ideas and traditions, without biblical confirmation; witness the disagreements of the obscure Jewish sages about the dateline. Jesus condemned that approach, and told us to look at scripture. Without those scriptures, some have suggested that Jerusalem should be the dateline. This is totally impossible because that would mean half the city keeping one day, and half the next. Others have suggested a boundary of Israel at Euphrates. That suggestion is equally impractical, as a look at the map will prove, for such a line would also cut through Africa and Asia, once again providing similar problems in many more areas of the world, and there are no dateline scriptures to back this suggestion. 

When the prime meridian is redrawn from Greenwich, and based upon Jerusalem, and then projected around the globe, it forms one great circle, and once past the poles becomes 180 degrees East or West of Jerusalem right over the waters of the Pacific, when Jerusalem is 0 degrees. This, I believe, is what God is describing in Job 26:10, as a statute, which actually determines the biblical International Date Line. Thus, that statute (a law which will be active in the millennium) directly links Jerusalem to the circle which now marks out the division between light and darkness, the beginning of God’s days, fulfilling the requirement in Isaiah 2:3, that the law will go forth from Zion, or Jerusalem. ‘And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.’

In fact, as we have seen, we are told that God created the dateline first, in Genesis 1:4, and then later positioned Jerusalem on that line (when it is extended around the globe). How wonderful and awesome are His far sighted powers! 

So what is the solution?

He ensured this by placing Jerusalem directly opposite what seems to be the biblical international dateline, on a great circle which goes right around the globe, actually appearing as the longitude 144.8 degrees West today, ( Jerusalem is now 35.2 degrees East of the prime meridian at Greenwich, so +180 degrees = 144.8 degrees West). 

The New COG dateline, conveniently skirting Alaska.

 

This line then lies 35.2167 degrees East of the present international dateline (which has been bent to avoid islands) right through the largely empty Pacific Ocean, but crosses Alaska unless, as a boundary, it is bent to skirt its shores.

In this way, even New Zealand and Australia share most of the Sabbath with Jerusalem, as does Europe and even the Americas, and the problem of the position of the true international dateline, which cannot be over land, could be solved (Genesis 1:4) while fulfilling the statute of Job 26:10. 

You can read the rest of this here: The Biblical International Date Line

There are hundreds of other sites by non-COG people who call the International Dateline, pagan, satanic, etc., so this is not really something new. Conspiracy theories keep religion alive, especially for Sabbath-Keepers/Messianic Jews/Yahwehists and others.

For all of these groups, the emphasis is upon days and never upon that inconvenient dude that beckons for them to follow him. Following the letter of the law is more important than walking in freedom.